1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to systems and methods for performing virtual machine optimization and/or storage reclamation in a virtual computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many companies take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Each virtual machine can be configured with its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., processor, memory, ports and the like) such that specialized services that each of the previous physical machines performed can be run in their native operating system. In particular, a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, allocates the computing resources of one or more host servers to one or more virtual machines and further provides for isolation between such virtual machines. In such a manner, the virtual machine is a representation of a physical machine by software.
With the increasing popularity of virtual computing infrastructures has also come a demand for additional storage. However, oftentimes a large amount of wasted space exists in such infrastructures due to the over-allocation of the static hard drive size when new hosted virtual machines are created. Such over-allocation, especially when combined with the increasing problem of virtual machine sprawl, can lead to terabytes of wasted storage space, resulting in thousands of wasted information technology dollars.
Moreover, many virtual storage volumes are created in such a way that causes partitions of the virtual machine disks (VMDKs) to be misaligned. Such misalignment can cause data to be written to multiple blocks during a single write operation, which results in additional I/O and a further reduction of application and/or system performance.